'Let me count the ways'
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese contains this famous poem--a tribute to her lover, the poet Robert Browning, and a complex exploration of the nature of love itself
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
What we love about this passage…
It’s as if the poet is having a conversation with her lover, who has just asked her: how much do you love me? She dutifully sets out to ‘count the ways’ in which she loves him. Pretty soon, though, she realizes that it’s impossible to quantify and measure love, because it exceeds all bounds. Yet still she perseveres, trying to pinpoint precisely the ‘depth and breadth and height’ of her love, and we end up with one of the most profound and thoughtful expressions of feeling for another human being ever written.
Yet there’s some ambiguity in that word ‘how’ that opens the poem. Does the word mean ‘how much’? or ‘in what way’? Is this about quantity, or quality? The poem seems to explore both possible meanings in its trope of measurement, and its final line matches that initial ambiguity: I love you so much that even death is not a boundary to it, in fact I’ll love you even more then….
About the Author
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was educated mostly at home, and was a voracious reader largely confined to the house by chronic illness. She became a successful poet and attracted the admiration of Robert Browning, whom she eventually married. They lived in Italy for her health, and she avidly followed Italian politics until her death.
Browning’s poetic subjects encompass women’s rights, children, the chronically ill, and the enslaved and oppressed—her compassion for suffering is, truly, boundless and immeasurable. One of her most remarkable achievements is her long narrative poem Aurora Leigh (1857), autobiographical in nature and frankly depicting many of the social problems of the age, including the deplorable treatment of ‘fallen women,’ the poverty of the working class, and the lack of professional opportunities for women. Her poetry deeply influenced the American poet Emily Dickinson as well as many other writers.
To read alongside…
In some ways, Barrett Browning’s poem picks up from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606), a play that centres on one of the most passionate love affairs of all time. Right from the start, the play draws our attention to the problem of quantifying love. Very publicly, in front of all her ladies in waiting and with servants fanning her, Cleopatra theatrically demands to know from Antony whether he really loves her and, if so, how much? Coolly, he replies that if you can measure it, love is worthless:
Antony: There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
Cleopatra: I’ll set a bourn [boundary] how far to be beloved.
Antony: Then thou must needs find out new heaven, new earth.
Barrett Browning’s poem tests Antony’s claim that to try to ‘reckon’ or measure love is to cheapen it. She seems to delight in the challenge of the such measurement.
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